Mayor Adams is still half-heartedly trying to wring money from Washington for President Biden’s migrant influx, which will cost local and state taxpayers $3.6 billion this year.
But it’s easy to see why the White House remains reluctant: City Hall won’t honestly account for how and why it spends money on migrants.
The latest example: The Adams administration has misled the public into thinking the city is cutting ties with DocGo, a troubled “emergency” no-bid contractor — even as it has quietly signed at least one new agreement with the firm.
Last spring, the city’s Housing Preservation & Development agency signed a no-bid, one-year $432 million contract with DocGo for “asylee housing” and other migrant services, then extended the contract until the end of this year.
The city picked DocGo despite the fact that it has no expertise in housing large numbers of people: It’s a medical-transport and mobile medical-services company that landed big health-care contracts during the COVID-19 era, when New York was just setting money on fire.
And never mind that New York already has many for-profit and non-profit companies with long histories providing homeless shelters, meaning the city should have been able to cobble together a decent bidding pool, even in a hurry, and tried to get lower prices through competition.
Earlier this year — after multiple reports of DocGo’s poor services, including hiring unprofessional security guards who bullied migrants and serving bad food that was thrown away uneaten — the city said it wouldn’t renew DocGo’s contract.
“This will ultimately allow the city to save more money,” a top Adams aide said in April.
The public understandably took this to mean the city was done with DocGo.
Not exactly.
As The Post reported last week, the Adams administration has begun a new contract with DocGo, this one a $41 million, one-year deal to manage a 1,092-bed Long Island City migrant shelter, beginning last September.
nypost.com/2024/06/16/opinion/how-city-hall-blew-41m-on-docgo-migrant-shelter-deal/